LOLapps Emerges from Stealth Mode to Take Over Facebook Apps

LOLapps is officially launching today, after having been in stealth mode for well over six months now. The company is actually a developer firm that’s behind many apps you’re probably familiar with, including Quiz Creator and Gift Creator. If you spend any time on Facebook, you’ve likely come across one of the many user-generated applications LOLapps powers, such as “Which Sex & the City Character Are You?” among others.

The company reports that its official launch comes with over 44 million monthly unique visitors to its applications. The data itself has been difficult to verify since LOLapps was in stealth mode for so long and has not listed itself as the developer behind Gift Creator and Quiz Creator. But with $4.5 million in funding from Polaris Ventures and angel invstors including Ron Conway, the company certainly has the resources to reach a great deal of users across several social networking platforms.
The beauty in LOLapps’ concept is that it’s greatly lowering the barrier to entry for those individuals that would like to create their own applications for the popular social network platforms out there. Not everyone has the wherewithal to program their own applications, and that’s where LOLapps stepped in. Available on Facebook, Bebo and other platforms, LOLapps focuses on user-generated content for a more personalized approach to some of the most viral application themes. If people love quizzes and gifting so much, why not let them create their own apps?

The gifting apps powered by LOLapps have been rather successful, as they’ve taken over a good portion of the leader boards for the fastest growing applications on Facebook. This isn’t surprising. Virtual goods is a rapidly expanding aspect of integrated platform apps, and personalizing such apps to a large degree hands the freedom over to end users.

These users in turn will do a lot of the promotional work to spread the word about the application they’ve created, getting friends involved and taking advantage of the viral nature of a user’s social graph. But this viral spreading can get a gifting or quiz app in hot water, depending on the techniques used to incentivize users. Many of the applications powered by the Gift Creator have needed to undergo modifications in order to stay within the ever-changing Facebook Terms of Service. These changes were enforced by Facebook to minimize the amount of spam-like behavior that can take place through a given application.

And the team behind LOLapps isn’t completely inexperienced when it comes to dealing with Facebook’s Terms of Service. Investor and Chairman of LOLapps Ariel Polar is also on the board of SpeedDate, a company that is known for acquiring other Facebook applications and converting them to SpeedDate apps, at times unbeknownst to users of the original application. SpeedDate has even been shut down by Facebook in the past.